Letters to the Editor

In the article on ESDI drives, the URL for the MCA page
should be: http://glycerine.cetmm.uni.edu/mca/. I love your
magazine. Three articles in this issue answered questions I had
been having. Keep up the good work.

—Pete dstrader@zianet.com

Linux and Compaq ProLiant 2000 and SMART

I have read articles saying many wonderful things about Linux
and I believe most of them to be true. Unfortunately, the extent of
hardware support that some of these articles claim is not a
reality—or at least does not seem to be when it comes to Compaq
equipment.

I have just spent the best part of a day searching the
Internet by various means, including various search engines, trying
to find drivers to support the embedded NCR 53C710-based SCSI
controller in a Compaq ProLiant 2000 and also drivers to support a
Compaq SMART SCSI RAID array controller. Result: nothing, except a
lot of stress.

Please can someone help me (and the many others who I have
encountered looking for these drivers). Linux claims to support
quite a bit of hardware—please extend this support to include some
key Compaq server items.

—Graeme Nelson graeme@cheerful.com

Open Source vs. Free Software

I'm writing you after seeing one too many odes to the glories
of the Open Source movement. I have a serious problem with the
whole Open Source bandwagon due to the fact that Open Source is
almost solely about making free software palatable to business—a
segment of society which has played a largely non-existent role in
the development of free software. Business has done nothing to make
the user and programmer community at large more aware of the
benefits of free software. I feel the primary benefits are
individual and social freedom.

The June article by Eric S. Raymond, “Open Source Summit”,
is a good example of the fundamental emptiness of the Open Source
movement. The O'Reilly conference report struck me as being more
about how Larry Wall, et al., can strike it rich than about how the
lives of users and programmers can be enhanced through free
software. I have nothing against people being financially
compensated for their labor, but being financially compensated for
one's labor has always been a secondary or even irrelevant
consideration in the free software movement and rightfully
so.

The most appalling notion implied in the rhetoric of the Open
Source movement is that we, those of us who use/write/support free
software, have to change our ways and adopt a more corporate
mindset if we want free software to be successful in the real
world. This is manifestly ridiculous. If free software hadn't
already proven itself thoroughly in the real world, there wouldn't
even be an Open Source movement. In fact, I think that free
software and the free software movement have proven themselves to
such an amazing degree that the corporate world now wants to find a
way to squeeze a buck out of us. Again, there is nothing wrong with
making a buck, but don't you dare do it at the expense of my
freedom.

Unfortunately, free software developers are not a major
source of advertising dollars for LJ, so it is
not likely that LJ will be publishing
alternate views to the Open Source camp anytime soon. That
apparently being the case, I would suggest that if
LJ readers are interested in an alternate view
of the free software movement, check out, for starters, Richard
Stallman's article “Why Free Software is better than Open Source”
at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-or-free.html.

—Shawn Ewald shawn@wilshire.net

While I disagree with your stated beliefs, I'm
always happy to publish alternate views—I have done so in the
past, do so now with your letter and will do so again in the
future. While it is true that LJ does not receive
advertising dollars from free software, we put free software items
in the “New Products” column and publish reviews and tutorials of
free software.

Linux Journal strongly supports “freely available” software
and the Open Source movement. This is one reason we chose the
Debian distribution to use in our office.

By the way, I see no reason for you to have singled out Larry
Wall as looking for a way to “strike it rich”. Perl is free and
Larry is most definitely not a money-grubbing type of guy.

—Editor

PPPui

My thanks to the numerous people who've written in response
to my article in LJ #50, “PPPui: A Friendly
GUI For PPP”. To anyone interested in more features—especially
anyone who relies on single-use passwords—please check
http://www.teleport.com/~nmeyers/PPPui/ for features added to PPPui
since the article was originally submitted.